I have played this game since Vanilla and played Druid since the end of BC. I have seen many of changes come and go and nothing will make me play another class. I love Feral and Guardian and don't mind swapping between the 2 based on my guild needs so it doesn't really matter to me how they change feral, I am a druid until the end. I have already snagged a bunch of gear to swap over to when 6.0 hits to be ready for any changes that may happen. Ferals still have a ton of raid utility and unless they remove it, I would say that the dedicated ferals will stay put.

If he meant: "In AoE situations, berserk is one of the strongest cooldowns in the game." I wouldn't necessarily argue.

But to just say it's flat out one of the best in the game is kind of funny. Granted I haven't really played much for SoO on my druid at all (yay casual) but all my fights from ToT you'll see me reeeeeally low on a pull and then catch up over time (i.e. Berserk is not a powerful cooldown).

I would agree that Berserk is a meh CD as of right now. Ferals just don't have the burst that other classes. On Garrosh normal when the adds come out, I throw up a DoC/Rune buffed Thrash and I go up to around 1.3 mill dps for a moment but most fights I burst like 700-800k. I raid with an enhancement shaman and he bursts close to 1.2 mill every fight but within 30 secs I catch up and am within the top 3 dps for the fight and the longer the fight, the more I pull away. Feral DPS is constant dps so we don''t have as high of burst but we do a lot of dmg all the time.

Although thinking about it now that stuff has been datamined, I think the tweet may have been referring to Berserk in WoD since we get the bonus 50 Energy cap with Berserk now and more of our DMG is going into Direct DMG vs all Bleeds like it is now. In WoD I wouldn't be surprised if Berserk is indeed the strongest DPS CD in the game.

50 more max energy during Berserk just takes longer to energy cap. It doesn't change Berserks power at all. 20% on Shred and FB isn't going to make a big difference yet. Now when they readjust numbers it may get better. However Berserk is still flawed in that once we have the resources to use every GCD (happens very quickly) it stops getting much better.

Hi, new here but I noticed the tweet didn't say if they were talking about PvE or PvP. I see this is a PvE topic but Berserk is probably one of the strongest PvP cooldowns in it's burst and survivability boosting. I can stay at 100% hp 1v3 with berserk up easy, or if I'm not getting focused I can rip right through a second wind. Berserk has one me many duels and many arena matches without ever having to use survival instincts.

Elamari wrote:I don't think you can compare game mechanics now to what they were in wrath. Bleeds had shorter durations and we had to keep mangle up. Back then Berserk allowed for some straight throughput rather than just managing bleeds and buffs / debuffs.

My point was, that back then more of our damage was from bleeds than direct damage. Then, thanks to PVP they tweaked the numbers so that bleeds would do less, and direct damage would do more.

This inherently devalues berserk.

Yet despite those changes to bleeds and direct damage, berserk did not change. It became less valuable with those changes, and still continues to be less valuable than it was back when the ability was first introduced.

Nortnort wrote:Hi, new here but I noticed the tweet didn't say if they were talking about PvE or PvP. I see this is a PvE topic but Berserk is probably one of the strongest PvP cooldowns in it's burst and survivability boosting. I can stay at 100% hp 1v3 with berserk up easy, or if I'm not getting focused I can rip right through a second wind. Berserk has one me many duels and many arena matches without ever having to use survival instincts.

Please explain how Berserk boosts your survivability against three players. I mean, more finishers equals more NS procs (assuming you aren't CC boned, which you should be against three players) but unless you're also running HotW or the three players you are playing against are absolute morons berserk is not going to be much of a help for survivability. And if you're running HotW it has more to do with that than Berserk being amazing.

Nortnort wrote:Hi, new here but I noticed the tweet didn't say if they were talking about PvE or PvP. I see this is a PvE topic but Berserk is probably one of the strongest PvP cooldowns in it's burst and survivability boosting. I can stay at 100% hp 1v3 with berserk up easy, or if I'm not getting focused I can rip right through a second wind. Berserk has one me many duels and many arena matches without ever having to use survival instincts.

Please explain how Berserk boosts your survivability against three players. I mean, more finishers equals more NS procs (assuming you aren't CC boned, which you should be against three players) but unless you're also running HotW or the three players you are playing against are absolute morons berserk is not going to be much of a help for survivability. And if you're running HotW it has more to do with that than Berserk being amazing.

I think he's talking about the Bear version of Berserk while in Feral spec. Triple mangle (and triple rage-gen) + Frenzied Regen spam allows for a decent amount of panic healing. They've not said what will happen (if anything) to Bearserk but I don't think its what Celastion was talking about.

Nortnort wrote:Hi, new here but I noticed the tweet didn't say if they were talking about PvE or PvP. I see this is a PvE topic but Berserk is probably one of the strongest PvP cooldowns in it's burst and survivability boosting. I can stay at 100% hp 1v3 with berserk up easy, or if I'm not getting focused I can rip right through a second wind. Berserk has one me many duels and many arena matches without ever having to use survival instincts.

Please explain how Berserk boosts your survivability against three players. I mean, more finishers equals more NS procs (assuming you aren't CC boned, which you should be against three players) but unless you're also running HotW or the three players you are playing against are absolute morons berserk is not going to be much of a help for survivability. And if you're running HotW it has more to do with that than Berserk being amazing.

I think he's talking about the Bear version of Berserk while in Feral spec. Triple mangle (and triple rage-gen) + Frenzied Regen spam allows for a decent amount of panic healing. They've not said what will happen (if anything) to Bearserk but I don't think its what Celastion was talking about.

No, I'm talking about popping berserk in cat form and spamming 1 CP ferocious bites with glyph of ferocious bite in, the amount of self healing this does is probably the most powerful in the game for a dps spec.

Berserk, intended to be our most powerful offensive cooldown, does not benefit from our mastery whatsoever. Is this a problem, or does its utility (in how you can deal damage with it up) make up for that inherent flaw? What are other examples of dps cooldowns for other specs that do not benefit from their mastery at all?

I don't think it necessarily matters that berserk doesn't scale with mastery, unless either the spell or the stat ends up too weak as a result. Is berserk too weak? As I noted earlier in the thread, it's actually deceptively strong right now (albeit not at the level Celestalon claims) and could become even better when/if DoTs contribute a smaller portion of our damage.

Nortnort wrote:No, I'm talking about popping berserk in cat form and spamming 1 CP ferocious bites with glyph of ferocious bite in, the amount of self healing this does is probably the most powerful in the game for a dps spec.

edit: words

Well, I guess. But then you're also using a glyph to make it that 'powerful' and you're not really doing any damage. At all. So you can survive a little bit longer with a 3v1 but at the end of the day where does that get you outside of BGs holding off a potential flag cap? /shrug

Stenhaldi wrote:Is berserk too weak? As I noted earlier in the thread, it's actually deceptively strong right now (albeit not at the level Celestalon claims) and could become even better when/if DoTs contribute a smaller portion of our damage.

I don't think anyone believes berserk is weak by any means, but when you consider the reliance druids have on bleeds on live and the wording of Celestalon it's easy to see why we're picking at his tweet. I just think it's an average cooldown. Nothing great, nothing terrible.

And to DoTs being a smaller portion of our damage, IF that happens, sure berserk would be valued much higher. But I don't really have reason to believe it at this point until we get far into beta.